We're incredibly fortunate to have Tudor Bosman join FriendFeed as our seventh employee. If you use Gmail or any service backed by Oracle, you've already relied on his code.

Tudor is one of the best hackers I have ever worked with, in the most positive sense of the term. In particular, he's one of a rare breed of engineer who really understands how to design reliable, scalable systems.

One challenge facing large websites is data center failure. For you non-engineers out there, this is what data center failure looks like:

When he was working on Gmail, Tudor implemented a novel replication scheme that enabled us to handle data center failures without skipping a beat, reducing downtime by an order of magnitude. For you non-engineers, here is another illustration:

For his next act, Tudor is going to help make FriendFeed better. (In fact, he already started, fixing a bug and launching his fix his first day on the job. He already understands our code better than we do, as far as I can tell.)

Traffic to FriendFeed has been growing steadily, and we need to improve scalability while preserving flexibility so we can continue launching features quickly. I am extremely excited to be working with Tudor again, and can't think of a better person for the job.